It was a pretty standard far-right account: anonymous (check); misappropriating St George (check); dripping with venom towards “Muslim-loving” lefties (check). But this one had a twist. They had found my address and had taken screen shots of where I lived from Google’s Street View function. “Here’s his bedroom,” they wrote, with an arrow pointing at the window; “here’s the door he comes out at the morning”, with an arrow pointing at the entrance to my block of flats. In the time it took Twitter to shut down the account, they had already tweeted many other far-right accounts with the details.
Then there was a charming chap who willed me to “burn in everlasting hell you godless faggot”, was determined to “find out where you live” so as to “enlighten you on what I do to cocksucking Marxist faggots” and “break every bone in your body” (all because he felt I slighted faith schools). And the neo-Nazis who believe I’m complicit in a genocide against white people, and launched an orchestrated campaign that revolved around infecting me with HIV.
This is not to conjure up the world’s smallest violin and invite pity, it is to illustrate a point. Political debate, a crucial element of any democracy, is becoming ever more poisoned. Social media has helped to democratise the political discourse, forcing journalists – who would otherwise simply dispense their alleged wisdom from on high – to face scrutiny. Some take it badly. They are used to being slapped affectionately on the back by fellow inhabitants of the media bubble for their latest eloquent defence of the status quo. To have their groupthink challenged by the great unwashed is an irritation.
In truth, the intensity of the scrutiny ranges from the intermittent to the relentless, depending on a few things: how far the target deviates from the political consensus; how much of a profile they have; and whether they happen to be, say, a woman, black, gay, trans or Muslim. There’s scrutiny of ideas, and then there’s something else. And it is now so easy to anonymously hurl abuse – sometimes in coordination with others of a similar disposition – it can have no other objective than to attempt to inflict psychological harm.
Take the comments underneath newspaper articles. Columnists could once avoid any feedback, other than the odd missive on the letters’ page. Now we can have a two-way conversation, a dialogue between writer and reader. But the comments have become, let’s just say, self-selecting – the anonymously abusive and the bigoted increasingly staking it out as their own, leading anyone else to flee. Such is the level of abuse that many – particularly women writing about feminism or black writers discussing race – have simply given up reading, let alone engaging with, reader comments.
Sending abuse in the pre-Twitter age involved a great deal of hassle (finding someone’s address, licking envelopes, traipsing off to the post office); you can now anonymously tell anyone with a social media account to go die in a ditch – and much worse – in seconds. Yet it is not my experience that this is how people who follow politics behave in real life. I’ve met people who are incredibly meek, but extremely aggressive behind a computer. Online, perhaps, they no longer see their opponent as a human being with feelings, but an object to crush.
I spend a lot of time attending public meetings. One of the most fulfilling aspects is when individuals with differing perspectives turn up. One man at a recent event was leaning towards Ukip, but he didn’t angrily denounce me as an ISLAM LOVING TRAITOR!!!! Instead, he shared a moving story of his father dying as a result of drug addiction, and how it had informed his political perspective. We were speaking, one to one, as human beings: unlike in online debate, our humanity was not stripped away.
The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political divisions are cemented by trolls who – without conspiracy or coordination – pillory, insult or even threaten those with dissenting opinions.
Being forced to confront opinions that collide with your own worldview, and challenge your own entrenched views, helps to hone your arguments. But sometimes the online debate can feel like being in a room full of people yelling. Even if others are simply passionately disagreeing, making a distinction becomes difficult. The normal human reaction is to become defensive. A leftwinger who is under almost obsessive personal attack from rightwingers or vice versa may find that separating the abusers from those who simply disagree becomes difficult.
Is the effect of this to coarsen, even to poison, political debate – not just in the comment threads and on social media, but above the line, and among people who have very few meaningful political differences? I worry that people will increasingly avoid topics that are likely to provoke a vitriolic response. You may be having a bad week, and decide that writing about an issue isn’t worth the hassle of being bombarded with nasty comments about your physical appearance. That’s how self-censorship works.
Of course, online rage can be more complicated. If you’re a disabled person struggling to make ends meet, your support is being cut by the government and you are feeling ignored by the media and the political elite, perhaps seething online fury is not only understandable but appropriate? Similarly, trans rights activists are sometimes criticised for being too aggressive online, as though gay people and lesbians or women won their rights by being ever so polite and sitting around singing Kumbaya.
The most powerful pieces are often written by those personally affected by injustice, and the comfortable telling them to tone down the anger for fear of coarsening political debate is unhelpful. On the other hand, there are certain rightwing bloggers who obsessively fixate on character assassination as a substitute for political substance. Corrupt the reputation of the individual – however tenuous, desperate or unfair the means – and then there is no need to engage in the rights and wrongs of their argument.
Some will say: ah, suck it up; if you want to stick your neck out and argue a case that may polarise people, you’re asking for it. Opinion writers hardly represent a cross-section of society as it is. But why would – for want of a better word – “normal” people seek to express political opinions if the quid pro quo is a daily diet of hate? Won’t those from private schools, where a certain type of confidence and self-assurance is taught, become even more dominant in debate? Will women be partly purged from the media by obsessive misogynistic tirades – I know of women who turn down television interviews because it will mean being subjected to demeaning comments by men on their physical appearance. Will only the most arrogant, self-assured types – including those who almost crave the hatred – be the beneficiaries?
Online debate is revolutionary, and there are few more avid users than myself. But there seems little doubt that the political conversation is becoming more toxic. And it is democracy that is suffering.
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